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fxwin

611 karma · joined December 2, 2024

https://fxwin.net/
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fxwin··on The k-server conjecture is true
I feel like the paper itself does a fairly good job:

> The [k-server] problem’s definition is simple: There are k servers located at points of a metric space. At each time step, a request arrives at a point of the metric space. An online algorithm must serve the request immediately by moving a server to the requested location, without knowledge of future requests. The goal is to minimize the total distance traveled by servers.

> The k-server conjecture states that a deterministic online algorithm can achieve competitive ratio k on every metric space.

I only had to look up what "competitive" means in this context, and wikipedia [0] had this to say about it:

> An algorithm is competitive if its competitive ratio—the ratio between its performance and the offline algorithm's performance—is bounded.

The ratio by which this performance is bounded for a k-competitive algorithm is k (plus some constant) [1]. We can consider the analogy of k support technicians ("servers) located in different (physical) locations ("in metric space"): The conjecture/theorem states that in any metric space (Not necessarily two- or three-dimensional), there exists an online algorithm that results in travelled distances of no more than roughly k times that of the optimal distance if all requests were known in advance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_analysis_(online_a...

[1] https://www14.in.tum.de/personen/albers/papers/brics.pdf Section 1.1

fxwin··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
its not quite the correct method though, the commenter suggests using the first row as a page index, and the second row as the word index, but the actual solution was using both rows as word indices within the 32 paragraphs ("Proquiritations") paired to the 32 numbers in each row
fxwin··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
I found this german blog: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we...

which links to: https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft/page/12...

which is in reference to the original proquiritations here: https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas00mait/page/416/...

i had also never heard of this before today and wonder if people had even seriously tried to decipher this at all?

fxwin··on Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work
Because in academia, your name and your body of work is a big deal that can open or close doors, and assigning credit is an important part of it. This isn't a new thing/exclusive to the AI era either.
fxwin··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
I haven't played it myself, but surely an article written one month after the game's release doesn't do it justice, considering there have been multiple major updates attempting to address the gripes players initially had with the game in the 10 years since then (And review trends on steam indicate that these attempts were successful)
fxwin··on Understanding Computer Memory Architecture and SSD Internals
False positives (Pangram labels something slop that isn't) I'm not that worried about, since the worthwile articles generally circle back to me some way through the communities I'm involved in, so I like to err on the side of not instantly reading something anyways.

For false negatives, that depends on the type of article at hand. If an error leads to me spending 2 minutes reading an article that ended up being not worth reading I'd be fine with an order of magnitude more than if false positives happen on articles that take 30 minutes to go through. Maybe on the order of 1-3% overall?

fxwin··on Understanding Computer Memory Architecture and SSD Internals
Unfortunately, given the sheer magnitude of text on the internet, we need heuristics to gauge whether something is worth reading or not. For authors/blogs that I don't yet know, LLM-generated text is a clear anti-signal for me, and Pangram has been very useful in that regard.
fxwin··on Why getting your hands dirty is good for you
> "I have a bucket of mud, in which I stick my hands for 15 minutes every morning.

Not quite but close enough :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWzWwx8T3nE

fxwin··on Hackers have withdrawn ~4k BTC (~$320M) from the Liquid Federation wallet
In a rug pull, the thing you own (usually some kind of digital asset) goes down in value, leaving you with less money than you started with, whereas theft leaves you no longer possessing the asset itself.
fxwin··on Hackers have withdrawn ~4k BTC (~$320M) from the Liquid Federation wallet
how is it a rug pull? if it's an inside job, doesn't that just make it theft?
fxwin··on Poetry book that Anthropic tried to censor
"censor" feels like the wrong word here
fxwin··on Terpstra Keyboard
> I'm just going off what regular typing keyboards go for.

Are there any regular typing keyboards with velocity sensitive keys? I genuinely don't know, it's just the first thing I'd compare this to

fxwin··on LLMs: Intelligence vs. Cost
> Why AA’s plot is misleading

> The first issue I have with it is that it uses a logarithmic scale on the cost axis. Using a log scale is the only way to make you spot the difference between a model that costs $0.015 per task and one that costs $0.032, while the same plot contains a model that costs $3.69 — almost 250 times as expensive. However, the net result is that the viewers can no longer appreciate the immensity of the price difference between the cheap models and the heavy ones; nor can they realize how inconsequential the price differences are between the cheap models.

This is an asinine complaint, and nobody can seriously tell me that the last plot on their page [0] is more readable than the AA one [1]. If I'm using a model at the lower range of the cost scale for whatever list of tasks, and i switch to another model at the lower end of the cost scale, my spending might double anyways! This should be reflected in the plot, and linear scale doesn't do it justice.

It's also much easier to see the mentioned pareto frontier in the log plot than in the linear one.

I can see why they disagree with the pricing determination for open/local models, but I don't think there is one clear right way to do it. So how do they do it instead?

>Hardware is priced at zero, on the basis that both an RTX 3090 PC and a 64GB Strix Halo are desirable gaming/work machines anyways.

...oh

Would have been nice to mention explicitly how the pareto frontier changes with those new calculations.

[0] https://openteams.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/all_models-... [1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-comparison-tabs

fxwin··on [dead]
> This course teaches the craft of building practical quantum circuits from scratch.

Can't wait to have an ion trap in my living room!

I would love to appreciate the work that is going into this curriculum, but when the lesson overview is overwhelming amounts of AI copy slop I just can't bring myself to be interested.

Edit: i'm talking about the text, not the pictures. It's not overwhelming in the sense that it is a lot of text, but in the sense that the amount of Claude-isms in relation to both word count and actual content is way too high for me to care about. Take lesson 9 for example:

9. Where the quantum lives

    every page is a classical drawing

    the animation is impossible

    each step has a classical model; they refuse to glue

    one story per step, no story overall

    where the quantum actually lives

    and the gap has a price, in coherent memory

I have no idea what is going on here or what the topic of this lesson is, and the same is true for like half of the lesson overviews here. Like i said, i'd love to be able to judge the content, but there is none here.
fxwin··on A fortuitous decade as an indie software developer
> That’s self-aggrandizing white male behavior!

I think you might be victimizing yourself a bit much there

fxwin··on Shade Map
Hmm, maybe I'm missing something, but what's the difference between "top of canopy" and "No trees" then?
fxwin··on Shade Map
I've seen the setting, and I've seen that you suggest toggling it when tree shadows seem inaccurate, can you elaborate on what that setting does exactly?
fxwin··on The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem
looks like both words are valid, TIL!
fxwin··on Reverse Jevons Paradox
I think it's still valid to see this as an example of the Jevons paradox: Your resource is money, and reduced per-unit cost means you are using your money (resource) more efficiently. If the total spend now goes up instead of stagnating or decreasing, you've got Jevons
fxwin··on The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem
> The set of points is defined to be not collinear, thus we cannot draw a line passing through more than two of them

This is wrong and you are misunderstanding what collinearity means. You could have a set of points where all but one are on the same line, and the set of a whole will be not collinear, while we can obviously draw a line that passes through more than two of them.

A different way of stating the theorem is that any finite set of points has either a line passing through all points (i.e. the set is collinear) or there exists a line that passes through exactly two points. This dichotomy (why two and not three? Why can't we construct a set where any line passes through at least three points?) is not immediately obvious.

fxwin··on The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem
> It could pass through three if those points were collinear but the statement says they're not

The theorem doesn't presume that no three points are collinear, it presumes that the set as a whole isn't collinear, which is a much weaker statement.

fxwin··on The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem
> hypothesis

I think you meant premise?

fxwin··on More German than many Germans
> Across from our office there was an Italian restaurant where we went for pizza sometimes. The pizzas were very tasty and huge, and it was the only place that sold half a pizza.

Immediately knew which restaurant (franchise) he is talking about here :D

fxwin··on Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
something something lethal trifecta
fxwin··on Computational chemistry, Locally? My rant on SSH
Yea it's a shitty environment, it's just a "oh sweet summer child" kind of thing to say :)

I agree that X forwarding is a terrible way for GUI apps, but the OP read like they were just looking at logs or plots/visualizations without much interactivity. X forwarding is good enough for that (At least good enough to give it a try over scping files back and forth)

fxwin··on Computational chemistry, Locally? My rant on SSH
OP is not ready for corporate environments if "VPN + ssh + 2FA" already "feels like too much" lol

I also wonder how they didn't come across X Forwarding at all? When i used a remote machine for my thesis that was one of the first things i set up, just so i could do small experiments on GPU and look at results more easily.

Basically every issue they seem to have is solved by using VSCode + Remote development (Transferring files, Customizing hotkeys, looking at outputs)

>And as for compute, I also realised that there are many small tasks that can actually be run on my machine

Yes, if you have a $3000 Computer, you can do many things that other people would need to use remote compute for. Depending on the "Cluster" they are talking about, the mac might even have better specs lol

fxwin··on How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?
Nobody is saying that they use "so little water and power", just that the average person has no clue about the orders of magnitude at which anything outside of a private household uses these things, including things they previously didn't really have a problem with (like golf courses or almond farms)

Most people just hear <gigantic number of m³ or kWh> and their brain goes "damn, that must be a lot, i don't use nearly that much at home"

fxwin··on OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation
> Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way: it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system - and we detected and dissected it largely with AI of our own. (https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026)

We are living in crazy times

fxwin··on AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy
im not sure which part of my summary you take issue with then? the reason for study 1b is not relevant to answer the question asked in the comment i replied to
fxwin··on AI advice made people 3x less accurate but 2x confident, researchers found
You can read the study here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1

TLDR: They studied both cases (Access to a LLM/Chat interface which gives a wrong answer when asked, and access to pregenerated (wrong) answers). Both experiments yielded similar results.

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